I have a teeny tiny pet peeve with dialogue boxes. Er, not dialog boxes — dialogue boxes, the ones in video games with scrolling lines of dialogue.

I recently wrote a dialogue box, and I saw a game that made this mistake, so here’s a post about it.

In the beginning, there was ZZT. ZZT was a set of little shareware games for DOS that used VGA text mode for all the graphics, leading to such whimsical Rogue-like choices as ä for ammo pickups, Ω for lions, and ♀ for keys. It also came with an editor, including a small programming language for creating totally custom objects, which gave it the status of “game creation system” and a legacy that survives even today.

A little later on, there was MegaZeux. MegaZeux was something of a spiritual successor to ZZT, created by (as I understand it) someone well-known for her creative abuse of ZZT’s limitations. It added quite a few bells and whistles, most significantly a built-in font editor, which let aspiring developers draw simple sprites rather than rely on whatever they could scrounge from the DOS font.

And then…

And then, nothing. MegaZeux was updated for quite a while, and (unlike ZZT) has even been ported to SDL so it can actually run on modern operating systems. But there was never a third entry in this series, another engine worthy of calling these its predecessors.

I think that’s a shame.

Sometimes, I lie awake at night thinking about programming languages.

That’s all the intro I’ve got here, sorry. I felt like writing about the switch statement for some reason.

Short story: I made a video game again! This time it was for Ludum Dare, a game jam with some tight rules: solo only, 48 hours to make the game and all its (non-code) assets.

(This is called the “Compo”; there’s also a 72-hour “Jam” which is much more chill, but I did hard mode. Usually there’s a ratings round, but not this time, for reasons.)

I used the PICO-8 again, so you can play it on the web as long as you have a keyboard. It’s also on Ludum Dare, and in splore, and here’s the cartridge too.

But wait! Read on a bit first.

I love having tests.

I hate writing them.

It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s hard, sometimes harder than writing the code. Worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything.

So I usually don’t do it. I know, I know. I should do it. I should also get more exercise and eat more vegetables.

The funny thing is, the only time I see anyone really praise the benefits of testing is when someone who’s really into testing extols the virtues of test-driven development. To me, that’s like trying to get me to eat my veggies by telling me how great veganism is. If I don’t want to do it at all, trying to sell me on an entire lifestyle is not going to work. I need something a little more practical, like “make smoothies” or “technically, chips are a vegetable”.

Here’s the best way I’ve found to make test smoothies. I’ll even deliberately avoid any testing jargon, since no one can agree on what any of it means anyway.

The web is a great thing that’s come a long way, yadda yadda. It used to be an obscure nerd thing where you could read black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now, it’s a hyper popular nerd thing where you can read black Helvetica Neue text on a white background. I hear it can do other stuff, too.

That said, I occasionally see little nagging reminders that the web is still quite primitive in some ways. One such nag: it has almost no way to preserve attribution, and sometimes actively strips it.

As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

I run veekun, a little niche Pokédex website that mostly focuses on (a) very accurate data for every version, derived directly from the games and (b) a bunch of nerdy nerd tools.

It’s been languishing for a few years. (Sorry.) Part of it is that the team has never been very big, and all of us have either drifted away or gotten tied up in other things.

And part of it is that the schema absolutely sucks to work with. I’ve been planning to fix it for a year or two now, and with Sun/Moon on the horizon, it’s time I actually got around to doing that.

Alas! I’m still unsure on some of the details. I’m hoping if I talk them out, a clear best answer will present itself. It’s like advanced rubber duck debugging, with the added bonus that maybe a bunch of strangers will validate my thinking.

(Spoilers: I think I figured some stuff out by the end, so you don’t actually need to read any of this.)

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

Maybe you have a Python 2 codebase. Maybe you’d like to make it work with Python 3. Maybe you really wish someone would write a comically long article on how to make that happen.

I have good news! You’re already reading one.

(And if you’re not sure why you’d want to use Python 3 in the first place, perhaps you’d be interested in the companion article which delves into exactly that question?)

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

The short answer is: because it’s the actively-developed version of the language, and you should use it for the same reason you’d use 2.7 instead of 2.6.

If you’re here, I’m guessing that’s not enough. You need something to sweeten the deal. Well, friend, I have got a whole mess of sugar cubes just for you.

And once you’re convinced, you may enjoy the companion article, how to port to Python 3! It also has some more details on the diffences between Python 2 and 3, whereas this article doesn’t focus too much on the features removed in Python 3.

…is, of course, naming.

Not just naming variables or new technologies. Oh no. We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.

I’ve been trying to paint more lately, which means I have to actually think about color. Like an artist, I mean. I’m okay at thinking about color as a huge nerd, but I’m still figuring out how to adapt that.

While I work on that, here is some stuff about color from the huge nerd perspective, which may or may not be useful or correct.

I’m almost 30, so I have to start practicing being crotchety.

Okay, maybe not all video games, but something curious has definitely happened here. Please bear with me for a moment.

A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.

This post is about the thing in the title.

I used to work for Yelp. For historical reasons — probably “the initial developers preferred it” — their mostly-Python codebase had always been indented with tabs. That’s in stark contrast to the vast majority of the Python ecosystem, which generally uses the standard library’s style guide recommendation of four spaces. The presence of tabs caused occasional minor headaches and grumbles among the Python developers, who now numbered in the dozens and were generally used to spaces.

At the end of 2013, I bestowed Yelp with a Christmas gift: I converted their entire primary codebase from tabs to four spaces. On the off chance anyone else ever wants to do the same, here’s how I did it. Probably. I mean, it’s been two and a half years, but I wrote most of this at the time, so it should be correct.

Please note: I do not care what you think about tabs versus spaces. That’s for a different post! I no longer work for Yelp, anyway — so as compelling as your argument may be, I can no longer undo what I have done.

Update 2016-07-27: PICO-8 0.1.8 supports music export — export "foo%d.wav" while the music tab is selected in the editor!

Our PICO-8 game, Under Construction, contains some music that Mel composed.

The PICO-8 can only play music that you compose with the PICO-8, and it doesn’t have a music export. This posed a slight problem.

I solved that problem, and learned some things about audio along the way. None of this will be news to anyone who’s worked with sound before, but if you know as little about it as I do, you might find it as interesting as I did.

I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is.

I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because I’ve implemented it before, for flax, and that took several days of poring over half a dozen clumsy explanations that were more interested in showing off tech demos than actually explaining what was going on. The few helpful resources I found were often wrong, and left me with no real intuitive grasp of how and why it works.

Here’s the post I wish I could’ve read in the first place.

Mel and I made a game!

We’d wanted to a small game together for a while. Last month’s post about embedding Lua reminded me of the existence of the PICO-8, a “fantasy console” with 8-bit-ish limitations and built-in editing tools. Both of us have a bad habit of letting ambitions spiral way out of control, so “built-in limitations” sounded pretty good to me. I bought the console ($15, or free with the $20 Voxatron alpha) on a whim and started tinkering with it.

The result: Under Construction!

You can play in your very own web browser, assuming you have a keyboard. Also, that image is the actual cartridge, which you can save and play directly if you happen to have PICO-8. It’s also in the PICO-8 BBS.

(A couple people using Chrome on OS X have reported a very early crash, which seems to be a bug outside of my control. Safari works, and merely restarting Chrome has fixed it for at least one person.)

I don’t have too much to say about the game itself; hopefully, it speaks for itself. If not, there’s a little more on its Floraverse post.

I do have some things to say about making it. Also I am really, really tired, so apologies if this is even more meandering than usual.